


The Golden Pineapple

by wheel_pen



Series: Viridian Mal [16]
Category: Star Trek: Enterprise
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fish out of Water, Gen, Imprinting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2013-04-15
Packaged: 2017-12-08 14:31:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/762413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheel_pen/pseuds/wheel_pen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A fable about an all-around fantastic king named Trip, a lowly servant named Mal, and a delicious golden fruit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Golden Pineapple

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Viridians appear human, but are actually aliens who imprint on other people (Viridian or otherwise) and form a bond with them. They also live their entire life cycle in about six Earth years.
> 
> 2\. In each series, a different character is a Viridian, who was raised by mean Klingons on an outpost. An Enterprise crewmember is captured by the Klingons and they inadvertently form a bond with the Viridian, who helps them escape. Then they return to rescue the Viridian and bring them aboard the Enterprise. The Viridian homeworld is contacted and the Enterprise crew learn the Viridian will most likely die if they are sent away. So they end up staying on the Enterprise, and the crewmember has to adjust.
> 
> 3\. The bad words are censored. That’s just how I do things.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this AU. I own nothing and appreciate the chance to play in this universe.

Once upon a time there was a handsome, brilliant, funny, kind-hearted, and all-around fantastic king named Trip. Kind of a funny name for a king, yes, but technically it was a nickname. King Trip lived in a beautiful castle in a beautiful kingdom, and everyone loved him. Oh, he could be demanding and cantankerous and temperamental sometimes—just like a hard-driving engine, really—but he never asked his subjects to do anything he wouldn't do first, and for longer. So everyone respected him a great deal and felt very fondly towards him.

There was one person in the castle, however, who loved King Trip more than anyone else did. Not only did he love King Trip more than any other person possibly _could_ love King Trip, he also loved King Trip more than he himself loved anything else in the whole entire universe. In other words, a lot. His name was Mal.

Now Mal wasn't a member of the royal court, not by any means. He was just a servant, and a very lowly one at that. King Trip, on one of his bold and daring adventures, had rescued Mal from some Bad People who were never kind to him at all and weren't very clean besides, and now the King was kind of stuck with him. King Trip was never nearly as mean to Mal as the Bad People had been, not even close, but they were quite opposite in personality and King Trip, though of course proud to fulfill his vast professional responsibilities as King, wasn't used to the personal responsibility of taking care of another person like Mal. But he did it anyway, because it had to be done, and Mal loved him terribly for it.

Mal knew what a burden he was on his beloved King—he knew he could be prickly and slightly silly, really, and somewhat annoying. He was awfully picky, especially considering that he was just a lowly servant, and he had to have his food, his sleeping area, his grooming, his general environment _just so_ or he became unsettled. He was also scared of a lot of different things, including anything or anyone new, pretend stories, the water—almost everything, really, to the point where he would have nightmares about such things if he didn't sleep in the royal bed with King Trip. _And_ , there were a lot of things that just plain made him sick that were harmless to other people, like pollen and seafood and nuts, so that Mal had to be very careful about what he ate and where he went. And because he wasn't very good about remembering such things, or at least knowing when something contained something bad, King Trip had to think about those things on his behalf. All of that thinking and soothing and waiting and coaxing and comforting and checking was a big job, especially for someone who already had a lot of responsibilities like King Trip, and for someone who wasn't the most patient or understanding sort anyway. Not that there was anything _wrong_ with King Trip, of course, it was just that Mal needed a lot more attention than an ordinary person.

To top it all off, there was only one really useful thing that Mal was able to do around the castle, and that was to take care of the King. Of course the King had been taking care of himself since he was just a Prince, and if he didn't feel like cleaning his own room or getting his own supper there were certainly plenty of other servants around to do it for him. Mal adored doing everything he could to assist and take care of the King; but the King himself wasn't always quite so enamored of it. Mal also did everything he could to protect the King, which was seen as rather more useful as the King had a tendency to get himself into trouble, whether with highwaymen along the road or with the laws of physics (sometimes Mal thought the King had earned his nickname by falling over things so much). Mal knew King Trip was very grateful to have him on such occasions, and moreover that King Trip felt quite badly when Mal was injured on his account. But there was quite a large difference between doing one big and wonderful thing every once in a while so someone could live, and doing many small and good things every day to be easier to live _with_.

But Mal tried to focus on the positive aspects of being in the service of so generous a king as Trip--such as the food. One thing Mal really loved to eat was fruit. He loved peaches and apples and plums and grapes and berries and oranges and bananas once the stringy parts were removed—all kinds of fruit, except for lemons because he'd had a bad experience with a lemon once. One way that Mal knew King Trip loved him at least a little bit in return was because he was always finding new fruits for Mal to try, exotic and colorful delights from the far corners of the kingdom. And really King Trip didn't _have_ to do that at all, because it wasn't like Mal was going to starve on what he already had. One day King Trip sat down in the royal Mess Hall and handed Mal a plate bearing a new kind of fruit for him to try. It was called a _pineapple_.

Now Mal liked apples. But this didn't look like any kind of apple he'd ever seen. It was flat, for one thing, with a thick ring of vibrant yellow flesh and a hole in the middle, and it was swimming in sweet-smelling juice. The color was a bit reminiscent of a lemon, which made Mal wary at first, but once he tasted the pineapple all such negative associations vanished.

The more Mal studied pineapples, the more perfect he believed they were. Unlike other fruit, which had a natural variation in coloration and shape, pineapples were precisely round, both on the inside and the outside. They were exactly flat on both sides as well—all sides, in fact, even the narrow edges that Mal examined closely. Each beautiful golden ring was so flawless, it might have been cut that way by a machine. They really had the most lovely symmetry—the ring could easily be divided in half, or thirds, or quarters, or almost any increment down to the tiny component wedges.

And the taste! Juicy and sweet, but with just a hint of tartness, of sharpness, to keep the sweetness from being too cloying. The flavor was distinctive and enjoyable on its own, yet pineapples also seemed to enjoy crowds—they tasted just as good mixed with other fruit, when paired with ham or other meats, and even on salads. That wasn't something you could say about a lot of fruits.

Even the color had grown on Mal—he found the yellow cheerful and glowing, so different from most fruits which tended to be bright and showy on the outside but pale and dull (if tasty) on the inside. With pineapples what you saw was what you got—they were the same stunning color throughout. They wore their heart on their sleeve, so to speak, and didn't put up a pretense about being better than other fruit, even though they clearly _were_.

So Mal enjoyed eating the pineapples a great deal. The only problem was that he felt he enjoyed it a little _too_ much, a little more than he should—after all, a pineapple was so bold and brilliant and all-around fantastic, and he was just a lowly servant. Surely a pineapple was meant for better things.

Then one day, knowing of Mal's fascination for pineapples, King Trip arranged a visit to the royal kitchen to see what a "real" pineapple looked like. Mal didn't know what the King meant by that, since he'd been eating "real" pineapples for a while now, hadn't he? He hadn't been eating _fake_ pineapples, right? So King Trip and Mal went down to the royal kitchen and King Trip chatted with the royal chef while Mal looked around for the "real" pineapple. There were certainly a lot of interesting things in the royal kitchen—not a place _anyone_ , even the King, was allowed to visit much, because about the only person in the castle more persnickety than Mal was the royal chef—things like random chunks of meat and jars full of dried herbs and wedges of cheese and some lumpy brown things, but nothing Mal saw that resembled his perfect golden pineapple.

Then King Trip picked up the lumpy brown thing. It was fairly large, though easily lifted, and although it wasn't the ugliest thing Mal had ever seen, it certainly wasn't terribly appealing. In fact it was covered with little spines and topped with a funny plume of stiff green leaves—slightly silly, really, and somewhat annoying. If it hadn't been King Trip himself telling Mal that _this_ flawed and not very beautiful object was a "real" pineapple, Mal would never have believed it. But the royal chef cut the top off—it was quite hard to crack—and there was the juicy golden flesh, hidden inside. Then the royal chef showed Mal how he had to use a machine to slice away the thick outer shell and hard core, and to cut the remaining cylinder of edible fruit into the all-too-perfect rings that Mal finally recognized. Mal was exceedingly surprised by all this.

But then he understood. Sometimes, when something was soft and sweet, it needed to be protected by a hard and prickly outside, to keep it safe from harm. Only someone who was very special, who was kind-hearted and all-around fantastic, would be able to look at a hard and prickly pineapple and see that there might be something soft and sweet inside, if they were persistent in looking for it and knew just how to crack it.

So the pineapple wasn't so perfect after all. But Mal didn't mind. In fact he loved it even more, more than he loved any other food item in the whole entire universe.  But not as much as he loved Trip.

And if you assumed the pineapple enjoyed being eaten, then they all lived happily ever after.


End file.
